Sounds like she’s solved the obvious problem with progressives’ police-defunding plan.

If every American simply ponied up $70,000 for private security, we wouldn’t need cops in the first place.

Congratulations to GOP candidates and their ad teams on being gifted with this clip, part of the Squad’s ongoing mission to purify their party ideologically by making sure all centrist Democrats in the caucus are ultimately replaced by Republicans.

Cori Bush: I’m going to make sure I have private security but defunding the police needs to happen. pic.twitter.com/6jbv4HLlGs

— Mike Berg (@MikeKBerg) August 5, 2021

All I could think of while watching that was centrist Dem Abigail Spanberger unloading on her party two days after its miserable showing in House elections last fall. Spanberger held on to win her swing district but a bunch of her colleagues weren’t as lucky. “The number one concern that people brought to me in my race that I barely rewon was defunding the police,” she told them on a conference call. “And I’ve heard from colleagues who say, ‘Oh it’s the language of the streets, we should respect that.’ We’re in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we are talking about. If we don’t mean we should defund the police, we shouldn’t say that.”

What if they do mean it, though? Cori Bush absolutely means it.

She’s the same idiot, by the way, who spent the past week galvanizing the left to demand that Biden extend the moratorium on evictions, a move which even the president recognizes is unconstitutional. Why didn’t Pelosi just hold a vote on the moratorium, as the Supreme Court demanded in its ruling a few weeks ago? Because: Pelosi knows that her centrists would have been left in a no-win position if she had, forced to choose between screwing landlords by extending the moratorium or infuriating progressive demagogues like Bush by declining to do so. Dem Rep. Stephanie Murphy, whose Florida district leans slightly blue, lobbied against a floor vote on grounds that the moratorium wouldn’t pass the Senate even if it passed the House, in which case why force centrists to vote on it at all?

And that’s how we ended up with an unconstitutional new CDC order instead of a House vote. Pelosi and Biden are afraid of alienating the Cori Bush fringe in their party before the midterms and decided to leave it to SCOTUS to disappoint the left instead by ending the moratorium via judicial order. Eventually.

In the meantime, landlords continue to suffer. Not the corporate landlords, who have plenty of money to get through this. I mean the average joes whom Bush purports to be looking out for, some of whom are now comparing their ordeal to slavery.

“Where am I supposed to come up with this money to take care of everybody?” Sookram asked. “What am I supposed to do with the very few that are paying me when something breaks for them? Should I tell them that I can’t fix their problem because I took the money to take care of people who refuse to pay rent?”…

Lincoln Eccles, who manages a 14-unit family-owned building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, compared the current scenario – the government banning evictions, but also not expediting payments to landlords who’ve been waiting for over a year – to slavery.

“At this point they’re just abusing us,” he said. “And it’s some version of slavery to me, forcing people to work and produce a product for free, and there’s no compensation.”

The irony for centrist Dems in having the GOP hang the Squad around their necks next fall is that centrists have been beating lefties reliably in party primaries. The NYT has a story this morning about the string of successes enjoyed by the Biden establishmentarian wing of the party at the expense of AOC progressives, most recently with Shontel Brown’s victory over far-left Nina Turner in Ohio. “The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of the results.

The most celebrated win for moderates came in the NYC mayor’s race, when former cop Eric Adams won the Democratic primary by running hard against crime. Since then, Adams has exulted in his new status as the face of the centrist Dem majority. “I’m no longer running against candidates. I’m running against a movement. All across the country, the DSA socialists are mobilizing to stop Eric Adams,” he said recently. “They realize that if I’m successful, we’re going to start the process of regaining control of our cities.” He also went on Bill Maher’s show and proclaimed, “This is not a socialist country, let’s be clear on that.”

Easy prediction, then: Dems are going to showcase Adams on national TV next year before the midterms, especially if crime in New York drops during his first few months in office. They’re desperate enough to counterprogram the Squad, a small but noisy radical caucus, that they’re willing to turn to local officials to do it. An ex-cop who’s hard on crime and in charge of the country’s biggest city is one of their best bets to try to convince swing voters that there’s more to the party than AOC and Cori Bush. In the meantime, though, Pelosi might want to huddle with Schumer about not celebrating the people who are going to lead to a midterm slaughter for Democrats. Schumer might not care — he’s protecting his left flank in his own upcoming primary in New York — but this sort of thing will come at a price. And it should.

Schumer lavishing praise this morning on @CoriBush.

"Cori Bush gets huge credit. One person who changed thing for 10s of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of people”

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 5, 2021